ANOTHER INHOSPITABLE STAY IN HOSPITAL FOR BEAU BIDEN

By Celia Cohen
Grapevine Political Writer

There have been too many hospital rooms in the 41
years of Beau Biden's life.

It is the first unforgettable memory much of Delaware
has of him -- a three-year-old boy with a mangled leg,
in traction after the awful car accident that turned the
joyous glow of Christmastime 1972 and his father's
improbable election to the U.S. Senate weeks earlier to
trauma and tragedy.

Joe Biden literally began his Senate career in a
Wilmington hospital chapel, his oath of office
administered by the secretary of the Senate there
because Beau Biden still was unhealed.

Joe Biden, just past his 30th birthday, by then had
buried his wife and baby daughter, both killed in the
collision, and brought home his two-year-old son Hunter,
recovered from a head injury sustained in the crash.

The Biden family slowly rebuilt itself, a new
marriage to Jill, a new daughter, but still.

Even into adulthood, the old injury sometimes could
make Beau Biden limp.

Now there is a new hospital stay, another shock
coming out of the blue. It is an unbelievable swerve in
what had seemed to be a straightforward stretch of life
as the Democratic attorney general, running for
re-election without an opponent even on the horizon, and
savoring the perquisites that go with having a father
who is the vice president.

The Office of the Vice President issued a grave
bulletin containing a statement Tuesday afternoon from
Dr. Timothy Gardner, the medical director of the Center
for Heart & Vascular Surgery at Christiana Care Health
System:

"Delaware Attorney General Beau Biden was admitted
this morning to Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware,
after having what we believe to be a mild stroke. He is
in good spirits and talking with his family at the
hospital.

"He is fully alert, in stable condition and has full
motor and speech skills. We expect him to make a full
recovery."

A later bulletin said he was being moved to Thomas
Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia.

What happened to Beau Biden was eerily reminiscent of
what happened to his father at 45, not so much older at
the time.

Some months after Joe Biden was knocked out of the
1988 presidential race, he was in the hospital with a
brain aneurysm, a blood vessel leaking at the base of
his brain, and if it had burst, it would have killed
him.

The doctors also found a second one, but before he
was strong enough for another surgery, he had chest
pains and breathing trouble because of a blood clot in
his lungs. He recovered from it all, although it took
about six months.

In his return to the Senate, he reflected on his
experience with the fatalistic optimism -- or is it
optimistic fatalism? -- of his heritage in remarks
paraphrasing Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

"To fail to understand that life is going to knock
you down is to fail to understand the Irishness of
life," Joe Biden said.

His son no doubt gets it. Beau Biden is not having
his first inexplicable medical episode.

As an assistant U.S. attorney in Philadelphia, he
volunteered in late 2000 for an assignment setting up a
criminal justice system in Kosovo, a Serbian province
under United Nations' administration after it erupted in
ethnic violence.

Beau Biden contracted some mysterious illness there
and returned to a harrowing round of doctors' visits. He
was weakened for months afterwards.

Now this, to someone who is a dedicated runner and
seemed fine to people who saw him only a day or two ago.
He has a wife and two little kids.

Life was not supposed to be so perilous, not after he
passed on a Senate race for his father's old seat
against Mike Castle, the formidable Republican
congressman and ex-governor, and not after he finished a
yearlong tour as a National Guard JAG captain in Iraq to
come back home where it should have been safe.